Late yesterday, the Illinois Senate approved House Bill 1628 which improves data reporting around the use of civil asset forfeiture (CAF) in the State of Illinois. Civil asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement to permanently take property or money from someone, even if that person is never arrested or convicted of a crime. Hoping to make this system fairer and more transparent, Illinois adopted significant reforms to its civil asset forfeiture laws in 2018. HB1628 attempts to build on those improvements by creating a more effective system to collect and report information about civil asset forfeiture cases. The following can be attributed to Benjamin Ruddell, Director of Criminal Justice Reform at the ACLU of Illinois:
House Bill 1628 is a significant step forward in our efforts to understand how civil asset forfeiture is being used in our state and to guard against any abuse of the system. The data collection contained in this measure will help the public assess how the reforms we made to the system a few years ago are working and whether further policy changes are needed.
Effective data collection should tell us a story about the individuals, families, and communities that are most directly impacted by our policies and laws, not just how much money is being collected from them. That story has had missing pages, if not whole chapters, of important information necessary to guide the legislature’s decision-making on this topic.
We appreciate the efforts of the sponsors, Senator Omar Aquino and Representative Will Guzzardi, to seek common ground and understanding on this proposal. And we applaud all the members of both chambers who supported the legislation. We urge Governor Pritzker to sign HB1628 into law as soon as possible.